The Coward’s Way Out: The suspect has left behind a confession and a suicide note. The race is on the find him before he can kill himself and evade justice.
Hope And Faith: Two murdered infants are pulled from the water in Colorado. Are the cases connected? The mystery will take years to unravel.
Behind The Mask: He committed a senseless murder as a teenager. Now, as an adult, he seems determined to make amends. Some habits are hard to shake.
Shallow Grave: A teenager is snatched from her bed in the middle of the night. What happens next is the stuff of nightmares.
The Lost Daughter: As a teen, Cathy gave her daughter up for adoption. Years later, she tries to reconnect, only to learn a terrible truth.
Alligator: Two young girls are brutally raped and murdered. The common denominator? A family friend known affectionately as Uncle Joe.
Cold Cases: Solved! Volume 13
Hiding in Plain Sight
Jackie Hollenbach and her husband, Terry, had a full house back then. Their niece, Audrey Giannotti, had a bedroom in the basement, sharing that space with her boyfriend, Bobby Haynes, and the couple’s two young daughters, Jaliyah and Jamora. Terry’s friend, Cory Vankeuren, also lived at the address. He was crashing on the pull-out couch. The conditions were somewhat cramped but devoid of any conflict... until that night.
It started with an argument between Audrey and Bobby. The pair had earlier attended a party with their two young daughters. Shortly after they arrived home, Bobby got a call from some friends, asking if he wanted to hang out. Audrey told him not to go. Bobby shot back that she wasn’t the boss of him and that he’d do as he pleased. Things got a bit heated, but then there was a beep from outside. Bobby’s friends had arrived. He left Audrey to sulk as he departed. She had already put the girls to bed, and now she, too, retired. So did Jackie and Terry and their other guest, Cory.
Silence fell on the house. It would be shattered just hours later.
It was Jackie who first noticed something amiss. She was awakened by a faint whiff of smoke. Concerned that there might be a fire, she got immediately out of bed, slipped on her robe, and headed downstairs to check it out. She was halfway down the stairs when she noticed something almost as alarming as a house fire. The drapes at the patio doors were fluttering in the breeze. Someone had pulled the door open.
Terrified that an intruder might have entered the house, Jackie crossed quickly to the fold-out couch and shook Cory awake. The two of them then crossed to the basement, intending to check on Audrey and the kids. However, when Jackie flicked the light switch, there was no response. The power was out.
Now, Jackie really was worried. Reinforcements were needed, and so she sent Cory upstairs to wake Terry. Meanwhile, she concealed herself in shadow, her mouth dry, her heart hammering in her chest. The sight of her husband, hair tousled with sleep, eased some of her anxiety. She whispered in his ear, updating him on the situation. Then the trio headed downstairs into the darkened basement. As they did, glass crunched under their feet. That, at least, clarified some of the odd events of this strange night. The light wouldn’t come on because the bulb had been smashed. That also perhaps explained the burning smell Jackie had detected.
The basement bedroom was a tight space. In the half-light from upstairs, Jackie could make out her niece, lying on her back under the covers, the girls in their cot. She crossed to Audrey, grabbed her by the shoulder, and shook, trying to wake her. No response. Then Terry stepped forward with his flashlight, and that was when they saw the blood.
At first, Jackie thought that the intruder might have come down here, accidentally awakened Audrey, and then beaten her unconscious to ensure her silence. Closer inspection revealed that it was far more serious than that. Even with that much blood in her hair, it was clear that Audrey had been shot. “Go upstairs and call 911,” Terry whispered urgently to his wife. Then he went to the cot, lifted the sleeping girls, and carried them upstairs. Thankfully, the children were unharmed.
Bobby Haynes arrived from hanging out with his buddies to find a flotilla of police vehicles outside the house, their roof lights projecting splashes of color onto the surrounding buildings. Crime scene tape was being strung. Officers were tramping in and out of the property. He tried to enter but was held back by a policeman and told he’d have to come down to the station to answer some questions.
Meanwhile, inside the property, officers were conducting a search and uncovering their first clue. Sixteen rounds of 9mm ammunition were found lying on the bathroom floor. The autopsy would later confirm that it was a 9mm round that had ended Audrey Giannotti’s life. The bullet had passed through her hand to enter her skull, leading investigators to believe that she had known what was coming, had tried in vain to ward off her attacker.
Down at the station, Jackie and Terry Hollenbach, Bobby Haynes, and Cory Vankeuren were taken to separate interview rooms for questioning. Haynes was flagged early on as the prime suspect. Hadn’t he argued with Audrey just hours before she was shot?
“That was nothing,” he told investigators. He also offered an alibi. He’d been out cruising with his friends, driving the darkened streets while his girlfriend was being murdered. Those friends confirmed his story, although it was far from the staunchest of alibis. Haynes was doing himself no favors, either. His response when told that his girlfriend, the mother of his two children, had been killed, was one of disinterest. A shrug of the shoulders, a pursing of the lips. When a detective asked him outright whether he’d killed Audrey, his response was to issue a challenge. “If you think I did it, then arrest me,” he taunted. The police did not have the evidence to do that. Haynes was free to go.
Next, attention turned to the houseguest, Cory Vankeuren. However, Cory had little to add. He’d seen nothing, heard nothing. If an intruder had entered the house, jimmied the patio door, and walked past Cory on his way down to the basement, he’d done so undetected. Cory had heard not a sound. Ditto if this unidentified intruder had struggled with Audrey and then fired off a shot. Cory had dozed right through the commotion. “I’m a sound sleeper,” he told the detectives.
Be that as it may, there was one detail that caused investigators to take a closer look at Cory. He was the registered owner of an Intratec 9mm handgun. Cory admitted to owning the gun but said that it was in a gun safe at his mother’s house, miles from the crime scene. He had not fired it in months. Officers were dispatched to the address he provided and confirmed that the gun was where he claimed.
Jackie and Terry also confirmed that Cory barely knew Audrey. They’d hardly exchanged two words since Audrey moved in. Not that there was any animosity between them. That’s just the way Cory was, an introvert. Which brought up the question of motive. What possible reason could Cory have had for killing a woman who was essentially a stranger to him? There wasn’t one. Like Bobby Haynes, he was allowed to leave. He remained a person of interest but wasn’t considered a high-priority suspect.
So perhaps the intruder theory held true after all. Maybe someone had entered the house in the middle of the night, snuck downstairs, and shot Audrey Giannotti in the head. The motive was unclear, but when did a psycho ever need a logical motive?
Several days after the murder, investigators returned to the house to conduct a second search. The autopsy had offered up one additional detail. Audrey had not just been shot. She’d been struck on the head with some blunt instrument, believed to be a ballpeen hammer. Detectives did not have far to look. The hammer was under Audrey’s bed, encrusted with her blood. Unfortunately, it had been wiped clean of prints.
And so, the case ground to a standstill. Bobby Haynes remained the prime suspect, but the police lacked the evidence to charge him. In the weeks following the murder, Haynes moved out of the Hollenbach house, abandoning his daughters. They would be raised by Jackie and Terry, who soon decided that they could no longer live in the property where their niece had been murdered. They moved to a new house, where Cory Vankeuren was a frequent guest, spending the night on the pullout sleeper couch. “Cory and I were best friends,” Terry later told an interviewer. “He was like family.”
Three years passed with no progress in the investigation. In cases like this, it often helps to get a fresh pair of eyes to look at the evidence, and in January 2010, those eyes belonged to Detective Harold Shenk. Over the next nine months, Shenk retraced familiar ground, reading the crime scene reports, the autopsy reports, the witness statements. Like his predecessors, the conclusion he drew was that Bobby Haynes was the man he was after.
But then, Shenk posed himself a different question. What if it wasn’t Haynes? What then? That line of inquiry brought him to other suspects, notably Cory Vankeuren. Cory had been all but dismissed because of his lack of motive. However, he’d owned a 9mm at the time of the murder. Had that gun ever been test-fired? Had it been subjected to a ballistic examination? Shenk posed that question to his colleagues and found that it had not. It was time to rectify that.
One of the first things a savvy killer will do is to dispose of the murder weapon, usually in a place from which it can never be recovered. Cory had not done that, which suggested that he was either innocent of the crime or woefully naive. He still had the gun and handed it over when asked. From there, it went to the ballistics lab. Given the willingness with which Cory had produced the weapon, Shenk wasn’t holding up much hope that it would produce a match. Except that it did. This was the gun that had killed Audrey Giannotti.
Cory Vankeuren was taken into custody on March 15, 2011. Charged with first-degree murder, he wasted little time on denials. According to Cory, he had lusted over Audrey for a long time. After witnessing her argument with Bobby earlier that night and then seeing Bobby leave the house, he decided that this was his chance. With everyone in the house abed, he slipped out of his shorts and snuck downstairs, semi-naked. He had the 9mm tucked under his armpit. If need be, he was willing to force the issue.
In Cory Vankeuren’s mind, in the fantasy he’d constructed for himself, Audrey gave herself willingly, even eagerly, to him. The reality was somewhat different. Audrey demanded that he leave and threatened to tell Bobby. That angered Cory, so he snatched up a hammer from a table and struck her on the head. He thought that would knock her out, but it didn’t. Audrey was still conscious, still fighting. That was when he placed the barrel of the gun against her temple and pulled the trigger.
Having gunned down the young mother in cold blood, having orphaned her infant children, Vankeuren kicked into self-preservation mode. He decided to make it look like an intruder had entered the home and killed Audrey in her sleep. First, he smashed the lightbulb in the basement. Then he opened the patio door. Finally, he got into bed and pulled the covers up to his chin. He was there, pretending to be asleep, when Jackie came downstairs. “It makes us feel guilty because we allowed him here,” Jackie told a reporter. “To think this man has been in my house for four years, facing us, knowing what he’s done.”
Cory Vankeuren was found guilty of first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. The answer to the mystery was there all the time. The killer was hiding in plain sight.
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